Innovazione e rapporto globale-locale: due elementi chiave per il raggiungimento della competitività territoriale in sostenibilità

In the territorial competitiveness studies the acceleration of the (markets, finance, environment, cultural) globalisation and of (technological) innovation have a central role in the growth of openness to international trade, of exchanges rapidity and of productivity. Despite these evident advantages are to underlined too negative effects as improvement of the economic gap between countries, of global pollution and of digital divide. These so opposite effects are related to the growth definition. Even if growth and development has been often used as synonymous, the territorial development, main target of a sustainable planning is something more then the simple production and income growth. The concept of development today is not linked a purely economic process but it is moreover defined as a multidimensional process having as final result the improvement of the population’s general conditions of life. Starting from this framework, aim of this paper is to present the theoretical background of the ESPON 3.3 project “The territorial dimension of the Lisbon-Gothenburg strategies” relating to the definition and measurement of the actual level of Innovation and Research and Global-Local Interaction in Europe, in a view integrating the other drivers (Quality and Use of Resources and Founds) of a sustainable and equipotential territorial development. Main result is the need to implement, in a integrated, cohesive and sustainable geo-economic framework, an approach oriented both to local scale (safeguard and valorisation of the local resources) and global scale (investments attraction, research, knowledge improvement) in order to realize a “bottom-up” globalization.